Europe's Invisible Migrants

Front matter

Europe's Invisible Migrants

Andrea L. Smith (ed.)

AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

Part One: Repatriates Or Migrants? Returning “home”

1. No Sheltering Sky: Migrant Identities of Dutch Nationals from Indonesia Wim Willems, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, The Netherlands 33

2. The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles, 1962 Jean-Jacques Jordi, Université de Provence, France 61

3. Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados, 1975-2000

Stephen C. Lubkemann, George Washington University 75 4. Repatriates or Immigrants? A Commentary

Caroline B. Brettell, Southern Methodist University 95 PART Two:

THE MIGRANTS, HISTORY AND MEMORY: RECON FIGURING COLONIALISM AFTER THE FACT

5. From Urn to Monument: Dutch Memories of World War II in the Pacific, 1945-1995 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Utrecht University, the Netherlands 105

6. Pied-Noir Memory, History, and the Algerian War William B. Cohen, Indiana University

7. The Wrinkles of Decolonization and Nationness: White Angolans as Retornados in Portugal Ricardo E. Ovalle-Bahamón, University of California, Irvine

8. Postcolonial Peoples: ACommentary Frederick Cooper, New York University

Notes Sources Cited

Index

169 185 209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of the authors of this book first met at the April 9, 1999 conference, “Europe’s Invisible Migrants: Consequences of the Colonists’ ‘Return,’” which was sponsored by the Institute of French Studies, New York University. Before that time, we had been working on our own, isolated from each other by geography and disciplinary boundaries. Once together, we quickly found that our research covered much common ground. Conference attendees commented on the multiple ways that the papers intersected, and suggested that this represented an exciting moment of convergence in academic scholarship, one that may even represent the emergence of a new field of study, and one that certainly merited consolidation into a common text. We thus embarked together on the longer project of developing this book.

The Institute of French Studies, New York University, generously supported the initial conference. I thank Susan Carol Rogers for suggesting that I organize such a conference, and for her unflagging and intelligent counsel throughout my fellowship year at NYU in 1998-9. I also thank the other institute members, including Ed Berenson, Jay Hogge, Emmanuelle Saada, Muriel Darmon, as well as institute students, for their warm welcome and the dynamic esprit de corps that characterized my tenure there. Iam grateful to Lafayette College, in particular the members of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, for the research leave that made that fellowship year possible, and for a second leave in fall 2001 that allowed me to bring this manuscript to publication. Lafayette College also provided financial assistance for manuscript preparation.

I thank William Poulin-Deltour for his care in translating Jean-Jacques Jordi’s chapter from the French. Caroline Brettell and Fred Cooper provided expert advice on all aspects of this project. Many colleagues generously assisted me in identifying potential conference participants, in further honing the conference theme, or in reading draft chapters and the book prospectus, including Thomas Abercrombie, Gerard Althabe, Joélle Bahloul, Thomas Beidelman, Peter Benda, Jonathan Boyarin, Renate Bridenthal, Robin Cohen, Colette Dubois, Kathryn Earle, Alison Leitch, Tony Judt, Ruth Mandel, Robert Moeller, Ceri Peach, Peter Romijn, Daniel Segal, Ionanni Sinanoglou, Steven Vertovec, and Thomas Wilson. I am grateful for their contributions, however I take responsibility for any shortcomings of the final volume. The book benefited from the assistance of Amsterdam University Press editors Suzanne Bogman and Chantal Nicolaes, and the careful attention of the copyeditors Marica Ognjenovic and Tijn Zweerts. We are grateful as well to Randy Lemaire who drew the map, and to Pierre Domenech for his powerful photograph that graces the cover. Finally, special thanks are due Lafayette College Excel Scholar Jennifer Bennett for her remarkable dedication to the project as we prepared the manuscript for publication, which included her keen editorial advice, research assistance, and unstinting attention to detail.

Introduction

In the wake of worldwide decolonization movements, an estimated five to seven million people were repatriated to Europe over a thirty-five-year period that began during World War II. This mass population movement represents Europe’s first important shift in the twentieth century from a site of net population exportation to one of immigration. It has now been sixty years since the first of these migrants, Italians from Libya, began to return “home” in 1940. It would be a reasonable assumption that considerable research has been completed on the long-term consequences of these migrations — the consequences for the migrants themselves, as well as for the host nations and their societies and economies, and, furthermore, that the results of this research has influenced wider theoretical developments in the social sciences. This is not the case. The subject is only now gaining the attention of more than a handful of social scientists. Previously, this work had been carried out by scholars of different disciplinary affiliations who for the most part were working within specific metropolitan contexts with little knowledge of each other’s work. As a result, their contributions also remain isolated from wider debates in anthropology, history, and sociology, and most notably from the rich and burgeoning literature on European immigration, integration and multiculturalism.

This book brings together for the first time work in English done by scholars who have explored the consequences to the migrants and the metropole of postcolonial return migrations to Portugal, France, and the Netherlands. Here I introduce the reader to the three decolonization experiences covered in the chapters that follow, presenting them firstin the wider context of the array of European return migrations associated with post-World War II decolonization movements. I underscore analogous and contrasting features of the colonial and decolonization histories involved. Finally, we will consider reasons for the “invisibility” of these migrants in academic literature to date, and the ways a consideration of this new subject can challenge and advance current theory.

Migrations of Decolonization — An Overview

The decolonization migrations considered here occurred principally in the decades during and after World War II. Certainly, mass migrations had been tied to decolonization in earlier historical periods; across the centuries of European imperialism, states often embarked on new conquests while granting independence to others. In addition, some colonial officers and settlers did not leave the region following decolonization movements, and those who did were not always bound for Europe, such as the Belgians who left Central for South Africa (Salman 1994:198). However, the mass decolonization of much of the colonial world that has occurred since World War II represents a sea change in world history, and the resulting migrations to Europe are the focus of this book.

What is the scale of this migratory phenomenon? This question is surprisingly difficult to answer. Although some excellent work on European decolonization has been published recently,‘ most highlight the political or economic aspects of this process, while the social and demographic details require further attention or remain scattered in separate sources. Furthermore, owing to the complexity of the various decolonization experiences, the great geographical expanse involved, and even the disparate kinds of migration patterns from each specific setting, the precise timing of these return migrations remains elusory. For instance, Italians began leaving Libya in the 1940s, while some of those who initially stayed behind left at the time of the 1969 revolution there (Rainero 1994:32). Similarly, British departures from India, Kenya, and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe were neither immediate nor massive affairs, but have been ongoing since at least 1945, the 1950s, and 1970s, respectively. Furthermore, the destinations of the migrants varied so widely — sometimes they traveled from former to current colony — as to make generalizations difficult at best. Even when we limit ourselves to people returning to Europe, research is difficult. Not knowing exactly when people returned to a specific European nation makes it difficult to work backwards from metropolitan censuses and other statistical data. Finally, the migrants were often not identified as such in national immigration statistics or censuses, making it difficult today to state the numbers involved with precision. For these reasons, the best sources to date have worked backwards from colonial records to provide low and high estimates of returning migrants.” The most recent effort is reproduced here as Table 1 (see Appendix). This was not an insignificant phenomenon: overall an estimated 5.4 to 6.8 million people migrated to Europe over a forty-year period from dozens of locations in the decades following World War II.3

Migrants were leaving an array of colonial settings, each with unique histories, vastly varying demographic and geographical features, and diverse administrative arrangements with European powers. Colonial scholars often find it useful for comparative and heuristic purposes to distinguish settler colonies, colonies where substantial numbers of Europeans settled relatively permanently, from economic colonies and trading posts (sometimes referred to as colonies d’exploitation), which were typically inhabited by much smaller numbers of Europeans, principally administrators, soldiers, missionaries, and traders, and which often had quite different administrative relationships with metropolitan governments and associated systems of rule. This distinction is salient here because in general the decolonization episodes differed dramatically between these two ideal-types, particularly when we consider the degree of violence involved and certainly the scale of the resulting return migrations. The repatriations that have received the most scholarly interest thus far are those associated with settler colonies. Research on returns from other settings is still needed to determine whether or not non-settler colonial settings should be included in the same analytical framework as presented in this introduction.

Who exactly were the 5 to 7 million people who made up these postwar migrations? To answer this question we must travel back to the colonial past. This was a remarkably heterogeneous collection of populations due to the complexity of individual colonial histories and the distinct decolonization experiences of each setting. In the most general terms, at least two main groups are represented: those of diverse origins identified in the colony as members or close allies of the dominant “colonist” faction, and imperial subjects, local intermediaries, and soldiers of various origins incorporated into colonial armies,5 all of whom were brought to metropolitan countries after their defeat. Leaving aside the repatriated soldiers of colonial armies for now, who were the others? Clearly they were not all wealthy landowners; only a small subset of those repatriated owned land. We could refer to this group in the most general terms as “colonists,” but this term is problematic. A category forged in the colonial context, it is based on a simplified opposition that rarely matched social realities (see Stoler 1989; Stoler and

INTRODUCTION * II

Cooper 1997). Perhaps to avoid reductionist “colonist/colonized” terms, previous scholars have described these populations as comprised of “Europeans” and “non-Europeans” (Miége and Dubois 1994:18). In this terminology, intended to approximate historical categories employed in the colonial context, “European” would be those granted this legal status by colonial powers prior to repatriation. However, this terminology too can be misleading or cumbersome because when we consider who exactly was granted European or equivalent status in the colony, we still find a very heterogeneous and colony-specific assortment of peoples which often included, along with nationals of the colonizing nation, nationals of other European nations, mixed offspring of European and indigenous unions, non-European or intermediate traders,° native wives of European men, and subsets of the indigenous populations.

These migrations occurred over a period of several decades, involving a succession of distinct population transfers from many different colonial contexts, beginning in 1940 with the return of 9,000 to 15,000 Italian youths from Libya, followed by the forced repatriations of thousands of Italians from the then British-occupied East Africa during World War II (Rainero 1994). Dozens of distinct states and decolonization histories are involved. Further complicating any simple summary of this phenomenon is the fact that from each colonial site, migrations typically occurred over several years, in phases. While with hindsight it may seem obvious that the world was undergoing a dramatic shift during the era of independence movements, this was not readily apparent to most European powers or to many in the colonies at the time. During the early periods of what we now consider wars of liberation, many future migrants did not realize the enormity of the changes underway, and many tried to continue on with their lives, only to depart several years later. Consequently, the successive migrations from any one location often represented different sub-groups of colonial populations. In many settings, the Dutch Indies, French North Africa, and British East Africa for instance, the first to leave were those with few ties in the colony, including people who were in the colony temporarily and those who had arrived most recently, such as government functionaries. An intermediate group leaving somewhat later would include the more affluent, those more recently settled, and others who still had family or other close ties in the metropole. Many in this category thought they were only leaving temporarily. They often departed with just the items needed for a short vacation, only to find it impossible to return, and consequently some in this situation left all of their posses-

I2 * ANDREAL. SMITH sions behind. Finally, in most cases, the people who stayed in the colony/former colony the longest were those of few means, people with the longest family histories there, and those with few or no ties to the metropolitan country; in other words, the people who had the most to lose by leaving.7

Dutch, French, and Portuguese Migrations of Decolonization

This book presents research conducted on the three cases of mass return migrations that have attracted the most scholarly interest thus far: those of the French from Algeria (a subset of whom often refer to themselves as pieds-noirs), the Dutch from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and the Portuguese from Portuguese West and East Africa (Angola and Mozambique, respectively), often termed retornados. These cases all involve settler colonies with substantial European populations, and many commonalities stem from this fact. However, these cases also offer quite distinct colonial and decolonization histories, allowing for rich and interesting comparisons.

Dutch Migrations: The Dutch empire had roots in the early seventeenth century, with trading posts and settlements ranging as far afield as New Amsterdam in today’s New York, the Caribbean, Dutch Guyana in northeastern South America, Ceylon, and multiple outposts in southeast Asia. By 1945 these territories had been reduced to three: the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch West Indies (Netherlands Antilles) and Dutch Guyana (or the Republic of Surinam on independence in 1975). The Netherlands tried to maintain these possessions after World War II, focusing on preserving its most important colonial possession, the Dutch East Indies, where Indonesian nationalist Sukarno had been campaigning for independence since the 1920s. After the region’s occupation by Japan during World War II and a declaration of Indonesian independence two days of Japanese capitulation in August 1945, the Dutch government sent troops to the Indies, in October 1945. A long conflict ensued that ended with the transfer of sovereignty on December 27, 1949.

Approximately 300,000 migrants arrived in the Netherlands from the Indies between 1945 and 1963, many leaving before Indonesian independence. This was a heterogeneous population. Since Dutch and other settlers and merchants from many backgrounds had been living in the Indies for centuries, a large proportion of those returning to the

Netherlands after World War II had been born in the Indies, and many were of mixed descent. People classified legally as “European” in the Indies in the 1930s included Asian wives of European men, Turks, Japanese, and descendants of Christian Africans recruited from West Africa in the nineteenth century to serve in colonial armies (Obdeijn 1994:51; see also Stoler 1989). At the time of the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, of the 300,000 individuals identified as having “European” status, approximately 80,000 had been born in the Netherlands or in the Indies of Dutch parents, 170,000 were “Indo-Europeans” of mixed ancestry, and 14,000 were people of various indigenous origins (Obdeijn 1994:52). Also migrating to the Netherlands with the Indies Dutch were colonial auxiliaries, including 12,000 Amboinese or South Moluccans, who had served in the Dutch colonial army and who arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1950s, and approximately 7,000 Peranakan-Chinese. This decolonization experience was traumatic. Not only did it follow several years of conflict, but the mass migration to the Netherlands also came at the end of the occupation of the Indies during World War II by the Japanese and the internment of thousands of Dutch in prisoner of war camps.

French Migrations: The French Empire also had its origins in the seventeenth century with the establishment of settlements and outposts in North America, the Caribbean, India, and islands in the Indian Ocean. After the decline and loss of most of these territories, a “second” empire was formed in the nineteenth century with colonies established across Africa, into Indochina and across the Pacific. By the end of World War II, this empire was extensive and extremely diverse. It included Algeria, which was incorporated into metropolitan France as three states or “départements,” Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), which the French tried to reclaim after the Japanese occupation during World War II only to abandon in defeat in 1954, the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, and an array of more classic colonies d’exploitation stretching across much of sub-Saharan Africa.8 North Africa had the highest concentration of Europeans, and Algeria was France’s premiere settler colony. While nearly 450,000 “repatriates” arrived from Indochina, Morocco and Tunisia in the 1950s and 1960s (Dubois 1994a:85, 92), research on these migrants is in the early stages, and this book concentrates instead on the migrants from Algeria.

French and other Europeans settled in Algeria at the beginning of the French conquest in the 1830s, and migration from Europe tapered off by the early twentieth century. As a result a large proportion of the over 1 million French who arrived from Algeria in the early 1960s were the 3rd- to 5th-generation in their family born overseas, not unlike the Indies Dutch. In contrast, however, there was very little intermarriage with the indigenous populations in Algeria and consequently a minute number of “mixed-blood” offspring. The origins of the “repatriates” were nevertheless multiple: more than half of the European settlers came from Spain, Italy, Malta, Germany, and other European countries, and became French citizens through naturalization laws in the late nineteenth century, and a sizable indigenous Jewish population was similarly naturalized in 1870.9 The association of these non-French nationalities with lower socioeconomic class status is an important feature of colonial Algeria that may have important implications for both the creation of pied-noir identity and pied-noir-metropolitan French relationships today. The reflux from Algeria occurred at the end of the long and traumatic French-Algerian war. Along with the French of Algeria, often termed “pieds-noirs,” came approximately 100,000 to 200,000 Muslim French who served with the French army during the colonial war? and former members of the colonial administration (Dubois 1994a:96).

Portuguese Migrations: The Portuguese Empire was the first of the European maritime empires, with roots in the fifteenth century, and ranged from Brazil to West and East Africa and included settlements along the western Indian and Chinese coasts. It was also the last of these three colonial empires to be dissolved. Portugal in 1945 had no plans to decolonize its remaining territories, and in fact continued to encourage emigration to Portuguese West and East Africa (Angola and Mozambique) throughout the 1950s, in contrast to the Dutch and French cases outlined here. The migrations to Portugal that occurred after the decolonization of its African colonies consequently represent the most recent of the three cases, and involve individuals who were settled overseas for the shortest period of time.

Approximately 800,000 Portuguese “retornados” (or “returnees”) arrived from Angola and Mozambique between 1974 and 1976. In Portuguese colonies, the status of “indigenous” person was fixed by law in 1954, but these laws were not applied to the small colonies of Macao, those of the Indian territories (Goa, Diu and Damao), or Cape Verde, where the inhabitants were de facto Portuguese citizens and therefore able to migrate to Portugal regardless of origin (Dubois 1994b:221). Elsewhere, a distinction was made between the “non-assimilated” and Portuguese citizens. While race was not ostensibly the primary criterion in this context, few African or “mixed-origin” people received a certificate of assimilado status. In Angola in 1956, only approximately 30,000 people of African origins received this status out of total populations of more than 4.3 million (Dubois 1994b:221), and what was probably a very small proportion of the “mixed” population of approximately 26,000.

There are some striking similarities between the three cases presented here. Because metropolitan states dedicated greater efforts to maintaining their colonies with the largest settler populations, the migrations all followed long and violent wars of decolonization, experiences that lent a particular tenor to the life experiences of the migrants both during their final moments in the colony and their settlement in the metropole. Many migrants left after having witnessed or participated in years of considerable brutality and disruption: conflict in the Dutch Indies with Indonesian nationalists lasted four years; strife in Portuguese West Africa started in 1961 and continued through the mid-1970s; and the French-Algerian war persisted for nearly eight years, ending in 1962. Consequently, departures occurred in the context of the utmost chaos. Government agencies in Europe were largely unprepared for the vast numbers arriving, and faced the monumental task of receiving daily thousands of exhausted migrants and providing them with food, clothing, shelter, and basic goods, with varying degrees of success, as is vividly illustrated in Jordi’s contribution to this book. Moreover, in each case, the migrants arrived ata particularly difficult time. Many of the Indies Dutch had spent the war years in Japanese concentration camps only to arrive in 1945 in a war-ravaged Holland where the government was already facing such severe housing and labor shortages that it was actively promoting emigration (van Amersfoort 1982:93). The pieds-noirs encountered a France that in 1962 was facing a severe housing shortage caused in part by the settlement the previous decade of several hundred thousand French “repatriates” from Vietnam, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt." Many of the half a million people who crossed the Mediterranean over a brief four-month period in the summer of 1962 lived for weeks or even months in military barracks, dormitories, garages and barns. The city of Marseilles, which received over 60 percent of the pieds-noirs, was completely overwhelmed.

The scale and speed of this population transfer across the Mediterranean was equaled if not surpassed only a decade later with the return of approximately 800,000 “retornados” to Portugal from Angola and Mozambique between 1974 and 1976. This was a massive influx considering that the population of Portugal totaled ro million at the time (Rocha-Trindade 1995:337). Moreover, Portugal, already the poorest of these three states, was in a serious recession at the time. The new government organization created to assist those “repatriated,” IARN, housed people in vacant public and private buildings, such as old convents or army barracks (Rocha-Trindade 1995:339) and appealed to migrants’ family members for assistance.!3 Ovalle-Bahamón and Lubkemann’s chapters here provide vivid testimony from retornados of their experiences during this time, testimony which, in concert with Jordi’s findings for France, indicates a lasting legacy of mutual mistrust between some metropolitans and retornados that persists in parts of Portugal today.

Finally, it should be remembered that in each of these cases, the first waves of returnees arrived when large numbers of nationals were being sent to the colonies to fight in bitter colonial wars. When the largest mass repatriations occurred, these soldiers too were returning home. Metropolitans who had lost family members or friends in the colonial wars often blamed the returning colonists for their losses, and they and the soldiers were often further perturbed by the fact that these migrants sometimes received preferential treatment in the already tight housing and job markets. When we consider the difficulties the migrants faced in adapting to their new societies and polities, we should keep the legacy of the colonial wars in mind.

The Invisibility of Migrations of Decolonization in Today's Academy

Given the scale and scope of these migratory phenomena and the degree of social and economic disruption involved, it is surprising how marginalized this topic has remained until recently. The reasons for its marginalization are numerous. The subject has escaped widespread attention in part because it is situated at, if not outside, the boundaries of several different academic disciplines and world regions. Colonial history and colonial studies have a temporal focus traditionally delimited by decolonization. While many of the important aspects of the migrants’ lives in the colony are the subject of recent and current research by colonial historians, the former colonists, by migrating to Europe, vanish from this field of study. Aside from a few far-sighted and comprehensive overviews," the “repatriates” also rarely figure in the burgeoning literature on immigration and integration in Europe.

Finally, due to the nature of the global diasporas that have comprised the life trajectories of these individuals, researchers necessarily must become experts in both colony and metropole, in the colonial heritages as well as the political and economic problems of contemporary postwar Europe, topics that are traditionally explored by scholars located in quite different disciplines if not distinct schools or academic departments. Disciplinary boundaries have therefore served as a hindrance to the recognition of this specific population and their experience as topics worthy of research.

Conceptual barriers have also worked to ensure that these populations remain invisible in today’s academy. In their landmark work calling for a new approach to migration history, Lucassen and Lucassen address the various “canyons” separating migration scholars both between and within disciplines (1999:10). Heuristically useful typologies have evolved into fixed dichotomies that now shape both theory and research, dividing migratory experiences and scholarship alike into distinct, mutually exclusive, camps. They call for our reconsideration of several of such dichotomies. These include the distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration, between which recent work suggests it is virtually impossible to neatly distinguish (1999:12), as well as the contrast commonly made in migration studies between “labor migrants” and “refugees.” Finally, the distinctions made by politicians between “good” and “bad” immigrant groups are also often implicit in research. I propose here that we reconsider yet another dichotomy common especially in work on Europe, that between “immigrant” and “repatriate.” It is in part due to the uncritical acceptance of this distinction that the migrants of decolonization have been disassociated from the wider literature on European immigration. I will also argue that this dichotomy has been so enduring because it stems from an often unchallenged “national order of things” (Malkki 1995), and because it overlaps neatly with or is informed by another, more covert distinction that shapes much of the migration literature today, that between “outsider” and “insider,” or that between “visible” and “invisible” migrants.

At first glance, the distinction made between “immigrant” and “repatriate” seems obvious and unchallengeable. Common usage of these terms would have us view immigrants as foreigners and repatriates as nationals returning home. However, to accept such a distinction uncritically is to reproduce discursive traditions forged by and for the maintenance of territorial nation-states. This is language that promotes the nationalist aim of assigning every individual to one and only one nation, and which would have us distinguish absolutely citizens from noncitizens, those who belong from those who do not. But when we move beyond the nation-state vantage point and consider these as representing two kinds of migrants, are they really so different? When we take a closer look at the populations these terms denote, we find that there are many reasons for challenging and even collapsing this dichotomy as well.

The origins of the “repatriate” designation are revealing. At the time of decolonization and the arrival of the first “returnees,” the official and legal discourse of several former colonial powers began, independently so it appears, to identify the migrants simply as “repatriates,” a term that persists in much official discourse today.15 This may have been the most efficient course of action for most governments. Identified as such, the migrants fell under the purview of already existing government agencies designed to aid repatriating citizens, agencies which usually had at their disposal financial resources available on an emergency basis to help such individuals resettle. However, the identification of the returning colonists as “repatriates” masked a far more complex story, as government officials were well aware at the time. Dutch administrators noted for instance that of the four subgroups “repatriated” from Indonesia, only one could be considered “repatriates” in the strict sense of the word (Obdeijn 1984:52). This term, which refers to citizens being brought home from a foreign state usually through government assistance, is applied with difficulty to the migrants. As outlined above, subsets ofall of the “repatriates” discussed here were never originally from Europe or the specific European nation-state in question. Many more were leaving the colonies before independence, and so were really people internally displaced from one part of the empire to another.'© Moreover, in contrast to classic repatriations involving the return of functionaries during political tensions or of prisoners of war, these migrations were often spontaneous, at least initially, and the role of the metropolitan governments was often minimal. In fact, both the French and Dutch governments attempted at different junctures to convince their nationals to stay in the colonies after independence,” as the migrants will readily point out today.

These migrants closely resemble other immigrant or refugee populations in many ways. Like many refugees, they left the colony suddenly, at the chaotic end of a specific political order, usually without the possibility of return. Like many labor migrants, most were migrating to a place that they had never seen. While they may have shared the language and an understanding of metropolitan legal and school systems, as reproduced in the colony, once they arrived in the metropole, they needed to learn a whole new way of life. They had to adapt to a new territory and climate, form new social relationships, learn new standards of behavior, and change careers. What the repatriate label masks most of all is the fact that many had no ancestral connection with their new host country. This was the case for the more than half of the “French” settlers of Algeria who were originally from other European countries, and thousands of Jews from across North Africa. When they “repatriated,” they were migrating to a country to which they belonged legally, but to which they had no family ties. Many Indies Dutch faced a similar experience, as Willems’s contribution eloquently illustrates (see also Dieleman 1993:119). And while Portugal continued to encourage emigration to the colonies as late as the 1960s (Dubois 1994b:221), the government later determined that at least 220,000 of the “repatriates” had no clear family ties in Portugal (Ibid:231). Even those falling more neatly under the classic “colonist” rubric, such as the ethnically French from Algeria, had been overseas for so many generations as to find little attachment to their purported home (hence the widespread use of “pieds-noirs” by many French of Algeria, who consider Algeria, not France, their home). Large numbers of all of these groups in fact found themselves so ill-at-ease at “home” that they re-migrated (Rocha- Trindade 1995:339). Thousands of pieds-noirs left France after repatriation for La Réunion, New Caledonia, Canada, and even California, and approximately 18,000 Indonesia Dutch re-migrated to the US (van Amersfoort 1982:870). Willems’s chapter provides a fascinating look at the role played by the colonial legacy in the lives of Indies Dutch settled in Australia.